“How John would have liked this,” Sax said, haltingly. So hard to speak of these things. “I wonder if he could have made Ann see it. How I miss him. How I want her to see it. Not to see it the way I do. Just to see it as if it were something — good. See how beautiful it is — in its own way. In itself, the way it all organizes itself. We say we manage it, but we don’t. It’s too complex. We just brought it here. After that it took off on its own. Now we try to push it this way or that, but the total biosphere… It’s self-organizing. There’s nothing unnatural about it.”
“Well…” Michel demurred.
“There isn’t! We can fiddle all we want, but we’re only like the sorcerer’s apprentice. It’s all taken on a life of its own.”
“But the life it had before,” Michel said. “This is what Ann treasures. The life of the rocks and the ice.”
“Life?”
“Some kind of slow mineral existence. Call it what you will. An areophany of rock. Besides, who is to say that these rocks don’t have their own kind of slow consciousness?”
“I think consciousness has to do with brains,” Sax said primly.
“Perhaps, but who can say? And if not consciousness as we define it, then at least existence. An intrinsic worth, simply because it exists.”
“That’s a worth it still has.” Sax picked up a rock the size of a baseball. Brecciated ejecta, from the looks of it: a shat-tercone. Common as dirt, actually much more common than dirt. He inspected it closely. Hello, rock. What are you thinking? “I mean — here it all is. Still here.”
“But not the same.”
“But nothing is ever the same. Moment to moment everything changes. As for mineral consciousness, that’s too mystical for me. Not that I’m automatically opposed to mysticism, but still…”
Michel laughed. “You’ve changed a lot, Sax, but you are still Sax.”
“I should hope so. But I don’t think Ann is much of a mystic either.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know. Such a … such a pure scientist that, that she can’t stand to have the data contaminated? That’s a silly way to put it. An awe at the phenomena. Do you know what I mean by that? Worship of what is. Live with it, and worship it, but don’t try to change it and mess it up, wreck it. I don’t know. But I want to know.”
“You always want to know.”
“True. But this I want to know more than most things. More than anything else I can think of! Truly.”
“Ah Sax. I want Provence; you want Ann.” Michel grinned. “We’re both crazy!”
They laughed. Photons rained onto their skin, most shooting right through them. Here they were, transparent to the world.
PART TEN
Werteswandel
It was past midnight, the offices were quiet. The head adviser went to the samovar and started dispensing coffee into tiny cups. Three of his colleagues stood around a table covered with hand-screens.
From the samovar the head adviser said, “So spheres of deuterium and helium3 are struck by your laser array, one after the next. They implode and fusion takes places. Temperature at ignition is seven hundred million kelvins, but this is okay because it is a local temperature, and very short-lived.”
“A matter of nanoseconds.”
“Good. I find that comforting. Then, okay, the resulting energy is released entirely as charged particles, so that they can all be contained by your electromagnetic fields — there are no neutrons to fly forward and fry your passengers. The fields serve as shield and pusher plate, and also as the collection system for the energy used to fuel the lasers. All the charged particles are directed out the back, passing through your angled minor apparatus which is the door arc for the lasers, and the passage collimates the fusion products.”
“That’s right, that’s the neat part,” said the engineer.
“Very neat. How much fuel does it burn?”
“If you want Mars gravity-equivalent acceleration, that’s three-point-seventy-three meters per second squared, so assume a ship of a thousand tons, three hundred and fifty tons for the people and the ship, and six-fifty for the device and fuel — then you have to burn three hundred and seventy-three grams a second.”
“Ka, that adds up fairly fast?”
“It’s about thirty tons a day, but it’s a lot of acceleration too. The trips are short.”
“And these spheres are how big?”
The physicist said, “A centimeter radius, mass point-twenty-nine grams. So we bum twelve hundred and ninety of them per second. That ought to give passengers in the ship a good continuous g feel.”
“I should say so. But helium3, isn’t it quite rare?”
The engineer said, “A Galilean collective has started harvesting it out of the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. And they may be working out that surface collection method on Luna as well, though that’s not been going well. But Jupiter has all we’ll ever need.”
“So the ships will carry five hundred passengers.”
“That’s what we’ve been using for our calculations. It could be adjusted, of course.”
“You accelerate halfway to your destination, turn around and decelerate for the second half of the trip.”
The physicist shook his head. “Short trips yes, longer trips no. You only need to accelerate for a few days to be going quite fast. Longer trips you should coast through the middle, to save fuel.”
The head adviser nodded, handed the others full cups. They sipped.
The mathematician said, “Travel times will change so radically. Three weeks from Mars to Uranus. Ten days from Mars to Jupiter. From Mars to Earth, three days. Three days!” She looked around at the others, frowning. “It will make the solar system something like Europe in the nineteenth century. Train trips. Ocean liners.”
The others nodded. The engineer said, “Now we’re neighbors with people on Mercury, or Uranus, or Pluto.”
The head adviser shrugged. “Or for that matter Alpha Centauri. Let’s not worry about that. Contact is a good thing. Only connect, the poet says. Only connect. Now we will connect with a vengeance.” He raised his cup. “Cheers.”
Nirgal got in a rhythmand kept it all day. Lung-gom-pa. The religion of running, running as meditation or prayer. Zazen, ka zen. Part of the areophany, as Martian gravity was integral to it; what the human body could achieve in two fifths the pull it had evolved for was a euphoria of effort. One ran as a pilgrim, half worshiper half god.
A religion with quite a few adherents these days, loners out running around. Sometimes there were organized runs, races: Thread the Labyrinth, Chaos Crawl, the Transmari-neris, the Round-the-Worlder. And in between those, the daily discipline. Purposeless activity; art for art’s sake. For Nirgal it was worship, or meditation, or oblivion. His mind wandered, or focused on his body, or on the trail; or went blank. At this moment he was running to music, Bach then Bruckner then Bonnie Tyndall, an Elysian neoclassicist whose music poured along like the day itself, tall chords shifting in steady internal modulation, somewhat like Bach or Bruckner in fact but slower and steadier, more inexorable and grand. Fine music to run by, even though for hours at a time he didn’t consciously hear it. He only ran.
It was coming time for the Round-the-Worlder, which began every other perihelion. Starting from Sheffield the contestants could run east or west around the world, without wristpad or any other navigational aid, shorn of everything but the information of their senses, and small bags of food and drink and gear. They were allowed to choose any route that stayed within twenty degrees of the equator (they were tracked by satellite, and disqualified if they left the equatorial zone), and all bridges were allowed, including the Ganges Strait Bridge, which made routes both north and south of Marineris competitive, and created almost as many viable routes as contestants. Nirgal had won the race in five of the nine previous runnings, because of his route-finding ability rather than his speed; the “Nirgalweg” was considered by many fell runners to be in the nature of a mystical achievement, full of counterintuitive extravagance, and in the last couple races he had had trackers following him with the plan of passing him at the end. But each year he took a different route, and often he made choices that looked so bad that some of his trackers gave up and took off in more promising directions. Others couldn’t keep up the pace over the two hundred days of the circumnavigation, crossing some 21,000 kilometers — it required truly long-distance endurance, one had to be able to sustain it as a way of life. Running every day.